ÉDITIONS DE LA TABLE RONDE RIGHTS LIST – FRANKFURT 2017

www.editionslatableronde.fr

Jérôme LEROY JÉRÔME LEROY

UN PEU TARD DANS LA SAISON ROMAN

UN PEU TARD DANS LA SAISON “BOTH

A SENTIMENTAL THRILLER AND AN ANTICIPATION NOVEL, UN PEU TARD DANS LA SAISON AROUSES OUR DEEPLY BURIED FEARS AND OUR LOST ILLUSIONS. AS WELL AS A LITTLE BIT OF HOPE. A VERY GREAT NOVEL.”

LE PROGRÈS DE LYON LA TABLE RONDE

3 January 2017

256 pages

LA TABLE RONDE

In 2015 or so, an unexplained and still covered up phenomenon spreads among the society and throws the government into a panic. For lack of any better word, it has been called the “Eclipse”. Thousands of people – from Minister to nurse, from housewife to big boss – suddenly decide to leave everything behind, to drop it, to give up, to disappear. While France and Europe are sinking into chaos, torn between terrorism and social rebellion, Guillaume Trimbert, a weary middle-aged writer at the end of the road, is likely to be one of the candidates to the “Eclipse”. It is at least the opinion of Agnès Delvaux, a young woman working as a secret service captain. But is that the only reason why she is spying on him, ready to interfere with his private life and intimacy, thus disobeying orders from her superiors? Seventeen years later, in a remote place of the southern region of Gers, where a new civilization is born – the “Softness” –, Agnès observes her daughter Ada and, meanwhile, remembers her past with Trimbert – that man who changed her life precisely when the world was on the verge of disruption. Seizing one more time one of his favourite subjects – the political struggle, civil disobedience and extreme left-wing groups –, which he heartily combines with a reflexion upon love relationships among adults who are no longer young and passionate, Jérôme Leroy portrays a political and sentimental helplessness that destroys the frontiers between fiction and essay. Meanwhile, he digs deeper into the autobiographic vein he had started with Jugan. Un peu tard dans la saison is a vertiginous and unmasking novel of anticipation. Jérôme Leroy was born in 1964 in Rouen. His novels Le Bloc (Prix Michel Lebrun, 2012) and L’Ange gardien (Prix des lecteurs des Quais du Polar, 2015) were published by Gallimard. La Table Ronde has published Un Dernier verre en Atlantide (2010), Les Jours d’après (2015), Sauf dans les chansons (2015) and Jugan (2015) and, in the series La Petite Vermillon: Monaie bleue (2009), La Minute prescrite pour l’assaut (2017) and Comme un fauteuil Voltaire dans une bibliothèque en ruine (2017) Rights sold : Germany (Nautilus)

Thierry DANCOURT

JEUX DE DAME “A CHIC AND MELANCHOLIC TALENT.” FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER, LE FIGARO MAGAZINE

“SOME EXTREMELY FINE LACEWORK.” MADAME FIGARO “A SENSITIVE AND MYSTERIOUS WRITER WHOSE MUSIC INEVITABLY SETTLES FOR A LONG TIME IN THE READER’S MIND.” LIRE

17 August 2017

208 pages

Since the publication of Hôtel de Lausanne and Les Ombres de Marge Finaly, we know for a fact that Thierry Dancourt is remarkable at portraying women. Today we may add Solange Darnal, the seductive and dreamy heroin of Jeux de dame, to his fictional gallery. At the beginning of the 1960s, Solange is an elegant and lonely silhouette sauntering in the Porte Dorée Paris, in the Berlin before the Wall, in a melancholic and rainy Trieste. People are driving Volvo P1800, smoking State Express cigarettes, and women are wearing buttercoloured raincoats. Of course, Solange keeps a secret. Has it got to do with that mission the Economic Council has assigned her, for which she has been sent to Berlin? There, she meets her boss and lover, Marc Jeanson, who wonders about her distant attitude. He doesn’t know that this time, in Paris, a young man is waiting for her: Pascal Clerville. Solange is oscillating between two worlds – truth and lie, light and darkness, transparency and secret – as she navigates between two men. Gradually, she comes to realize that she loves one more than the other, and even that she is probably in love for the very first time… Hence, the ebb and flow of the heart, as well as childhood memories, make their way through a shadowing, or through a meeting about the launch of a soviet satellite. But to reader, the one question that matters is: who is Solange? Does she even know? In Jeux de Dame, Thierry Dancourt manages to do something only he can do: combining the Modiano style with John Le Carré’s codes, and to turn his characters into double agents of melancholy. Thierry Dancourt was born in Montmorency. He is an editor in the fields of architecture and urbanism. Hôtel de Lausanne (La Table Ronde, 2008, 10/18, 2010) was written in Paris and in Casablanca, and was awarded the “Prix du Premier Roman” (First Novel Award) in France. His two other books, Jardin d’hiver (2010) and Les Ombres de Marge Finaly (2012), were also published at La Table Ronde.

Michel BERNARD MICHEL BERNARD

LE BON CŒUR ROMAN

LE BON COEUR « A HIGH-FLYING WRITER. » SUD-OUEST DIMANCHE

« ONE OF OUR GREATEST NOVELISTS OF TODAY. » LA MARSEILLAISE

« AN PEERLESS STYLIST. » LA TABLE RONDE

OLIVIER BARROT, FRANCE 3 To be published on 4 January 2018

240 pages

In Michel Bernard’s Le Bon Coeur, Joan of Arc’s story starts when the exasperated Lord of Baudricourt slaps a young peasant girl. In a France almost entirely occupied by the English, he is still holding onto a tiny territory along the Meuse River and this girl has returned to ask him for soldiers to restore the king to his throne. The Lord of Baudricourt knows that Joan isn’t insane – that would be too easy. He also knows that troubled times often give rise to visionaries and false prophets. And yet, like so many after him, he will give in to this strange young girl with her “tall frame, broad shoulders, solid stance, open face, and bright and penetrating eyes”. It is no coincidence that Michel Bernard has taken an interest in one of France’s most famous figures. Joan embodies the major themes of his work and incarnates the title of another one of his books, The Body of France; a “body” that may appear destroyed at times, but that tirelessly comes back to life. Le Bon Coeur is not about scandalous revelations or unfounded hypotheses concerning Joan of Arc. In writing this novel, Michel Bernard had a different objective. Like a minstrel, he plunges us into a familiar story, or at least one that we think we know. He paints the landscapes with understated lyricism and describes the battles with such calm surprise that Joan materializes before us as she did before her contemporaries: selfevident and beyond the reach of men. Le Bon Coeur is a novel about the voice of a seventeen-year-old peasant girl who saved France from falling into the abyss, and died for it. She changed the course of history by rekindling the strength to believe and to love in the weary hearts of men.

Michel Bernard was born in Bar-le-Duc. After La Tranchée de Calonne in 2007 (Prix Erckmann-Chatrian), he published at la Table Ronde, La Maison du docteur Laheurte (2008, Prix Maurice Genevoix), Le Corps de la France (2010, Prix Erwan Bergot de l’Armée de Terre), Pour Genevoix (2011), Les Forêts de Ravel (2015, Prix de la ville de Deauville) and Deux remords de Claude Monet (2016, Prix Libraires en Seine).

Philippe RAHMY

MONARQUES “THERE IS, IN RAHMY’S WRITING, A CERTAIN MANNER OF ASSEMBLING SENTENCES, OF CONSTRUCTING THE PAGE, AND A RIGOR, THAT ARE DIFFERENT FROM THE USUAL STYLISTIC EFFECTS OR AESTHETIC CONCERNS – THEIR STRENGTH COMES FROM THEIR ETHICAL NATURE.” REMUE.NET

31 August 2017

208 pages

In the fall of 1983, I leave my native countryside at the foot of the Jura mountains to join the “école du Louvre”. I work at the restaurant Le Conti to pay for my studies, and live in an attic room in the Mazarine Street, right next to the one where Champollion had deciphered hieroglyphs. Dazzled by the city lights, I discover Saint-Germain-des-Prés, its bookshops, publishing houses, cafés and cabarets. But back home, at the farm in Switzerland, my father is ill. I learn that he is dying the very day I come across Herschel Grynszpan’s name; he was a Jewish teenager who escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, and who sought refuge in Paris. For some deeply buried reasons, that I acknowledge today, it took me thirty years to tell his story while exploring the one of my family. My investigation throughout time and space has spread over two continents and three generations. I knocked at many doors, including tombstones’. Some of them opened, leading to the encounters and friendships that fed this book. I don’t know what my life would have been without literature, but I know that each path of mine leads to the South of the Mediterranean, be it a path of the adventurer’s impossible dream, or a path walked along pen in hand. I have travelled in a cart with my grandmother Gertrud, with my mother and both my uncles who were escaping Berlin and the Allies’ bombings. I left Heilbronn, in the South of Germany, overnight, and went to Tel-Aviv with my grant-aunt Charlotte, chased by the Nazis. I boarded the Étoile matutine towards Alexandria with Yvonne and Ali, my paternal grandparents, and I witnessed my father’s birth, in a white house on the edge of the desert. A father whose hand I held on his deathbed, before I found out his secret. Herschel has walked by my side during my journeys, for as long as I have tried to trace him. My travel with this ghost has led me way further than I had imagined. Together we have crossed many frontiers, until we found the one of forgiveness. P. R. Philippe Rahmy was born in 1965. He has published two volumes of poetry at Cheyne Éditeur: Mouvement par la fin, with an afterword by Jacques Dupin (2005), and Demeure le corps (2007). In 2013, he published at La Table Ronde Béton armé, a story which won various literary prizes and was selected as best travel book of the year by the magazine LIRE. In 2016, his first novel Allegra was awarded the Swiss literature award.

Anna VALLAEYS

HAUTES SOLITUDES R ETRACING THE SHEEP PATHS OF YESTERDAY “WHAT

A JOY! SOLITARY HEIGHTS IS A DELIGHT AND A VERITABLE ENCYCLOPEDIA. DON’T THINK TWICE, HEAD OUT ON THE PATH. YOU’LL NEVER LOOK BACK.” HAUTE-PROVENCE INFO

31 August 2017

208 pages

It’s a journey as old as Provence itself. Moved by an irresistible call every spring, processions of sheep would set off as they made their way through plains and gorges toward higher altitudes and alpine pastures. This tradition abruptly died out in the 1970s, cut off at the knees by high-speed asphalt roads, regrouping of land, and fenced properties. Now, herds are brought to summer pastures in livestock trucks. To find out what became of these major seasonal migration pathways, Anne Vallaeys headed out on foot and retraced Arles’ old sheep path which has been saved from oblivion by pastoral enthusiasts. She covered 380 kilometers alongside one of her daughter’s friends. In these interwoven pastoral pathways, she continuously got lost only to find her way again. Between arid plains, dense forests, valleys and mountain ridges, not to mention extreme heat and storms, she visited Camargue, the Alpilles, the region of Aix, Verdon, the Valensole plateau; and the valleys of Asse, Bléone, and Laverq. She also met some extraordinary people along the way. This book is a hymn to Provence’s solitary heights and an ardent celebration of those who live there: livestock farmers, shepherds, rebels without a cause, or perhaps just lovers of the landscapes where they have chosen to live in harmony with their animals.

A member of the founding team of Libération, Anne Vallaeys has published several novels, including the Barcelonnettes trilogy with Alain Dugrand (Lattès, 1983, Fayard, 2003). She is also the author of many essays and investigative pieces, in particular Médecins sans frontières, la biographie [Doctors Without Borders: A Biography] (Fayard, 2004), which won the Joseph-Kessel prize and has been adapted for television.

L’ICONOGRAPHE 50 BOOKS AS DREAMT 50 ILLUSTRATORS Foreword by Jean-Christophe Napias

WHAT IS THE BOOK OF YOUR LIFE? DESIGN ITS COVER.

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120 pages

05/05/17 12:00

Fifty illustrators have agreed to play along, and to create the cover of a book. Not just any book: the one they have always wanted to illustrate; a book that has left a deep mark on them; their bedside reading – since their childhood, adolescence, or a more recent period; the one book they would take on a desert island; the one they have read twice, or maybe three, four, five times; the one they have given as a present more than once – unless they cherish it on the sly, as their little secret; in short, the book of their life. A famous or unknown book, by a famous or unknown author, French or foreign; preferably a novel, but not necessarily. We have also asked them to explain why they chose this particular text, what it means to them. Fifty books, fifty authors are gathered in this volume, an ideal as well as unexpected library collection. Homer’s Odyssey, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Henry Miller’s Sexus, Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Moking Bird, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary… Illustrated by Blutch, Anne-Lise Boutin, Michel Bouvet, Lucille Clerc, Gérard Dubois, Jacques Floret, Geneviève Gauckler, Martin Jarrie, Jean-François, Martin, Tom de Pékin, Emmanuel Pierre, Alain Pilon, Placid, Chloé Poizat, Anne-Margot Ramstein, Lorrain Sorlet, Stéphane Trapier… Every book cover of this ideal collection is an invitation to reading. L’Iconographe, an unprecedented literary and graphic project, is a genuine art book. In 2018, Le Discographe will follow L’Iconographe’s footsteps, with fifty illustrators imagining an ideal collection of records while presenting their personal sleeve for the record of their choice – it will be a way to honour the comeback of vinyl records.

Adolfo Bioy-Casares

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CONTACTS: Éditions de La Table Ronde 26, rue de Condé 75006 Paris www.editionslatableronde.fr Alice Déon, CEO [email protected] tél: + 33 1 40 46 71 04 Anna Vateva, Foreign Rights [email protected] tél: + 33 1 40 46 71 02